1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to processing procedures for installing software and performing an environment check and recovery thereof.
2. Description of the Related Art
Along with improvement in functions of applications, system changes which are necessary for using software have increased year after year. Items needs to be changed in the system include an increase of a number of modules arranged in the system, addition of descriptions to a registry necessary for operating modules, changes in a security setting of an operating system (OS), and so on and so forth. In addition, some applications may operate using other company's software, and the other company's software need to be installed in advance. For example, Windows Presentation Foundation application (hereinafter, referred to as a WPF application) has a problem in that the WPF application does not properly operate if “.NetFramework” (i.e., other company's software) in a version corresponding to the WPF application is not installed in a system environment (hereinafter, referred to as environment).
In view of such a problem, in a case where software necessary for an operation of an application is not installed, software necessary for the operation of the application is generally installed during installation processing of an installer of the relevant application. However, in a case where software necessary for the operation of the application has been already installed in the environment but there is any defect in the environment of the installed software (presence of files, registry information, or environment variables), there is concern that the application may not operate correctly.
Thus, conventionally, a technique for determining during installation processing of software whether an installation target application properly operates and determining whether to install the application before installing the application, is discussed. (for example, Japanese Patent Application laid-Open No. 2004-129246) According to the technique, since whether the application properly operates can be determined during installation processing, and thus, an issue such that the installation target application does not properly operate can be prevented. In addition, it is described that various pieces of product information such as product identification (ID), a vendor name, an application name, a version, and necessary resources are used for the determination.
In the above-described conventional technique, whether the application can be used is determined from the product information of the target application before the application is installed, and thus it is determined whether to install the application. In this case, if it is determined that the application is cannot be used by an installer, eventually the application cannot be installed.
Further, in addition to the viewpoints of the above-described conventional technique, it is also necessary to take into consideration the occurrence of defects in the operation of OS resulting from installation of the application due to an issue relating to hardware. For example, when the WPF application is activated, the OS may go into a blue screen state due to defects associated with a chipset and a driver. If a user who has fallen into such a situation is not familiar with software or hardware, sometime the user cannot take a solution for properly operating the application.